Bismarck described politics as the art of the possible, probably quoted older sources. And to succeed they must often involve compromise.
It’s my very inexpert opinion that of all British Prime Ministers, Henry Campbell Bannerman was wholly motivated by good intentions. He was the last Liberal leader to lead his party to victory in a General Election without needing the support of any other party, Irish or Labour. Unlike Asquith, who succeeded him, he never supported the war on the Boers. He made a generous settlement giving them Dominion Status. He favoured Irish Home Rule, and generous welfare-statish measures for the UK (as already enacted in Germany) and international peace.
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Since 1904 Asquith and other Liberal Imperialist MPs were hand-in-glove with Arthur Balfour’s Tories, planning war on Germany, in the secret Committee of Imperial Defence, behind the back of many Parliamentarians and most of the public.
“Poor Little Belgium’s” 1914 Plight had Sweet Fanny Adams to do with the
Great War whose fruits have the potential to obliterate life on earth in the
very near future.
British Labour Prime Ministers in power were belligerent Imperialists every bit as much as the Committee for Imperial Defence. Attlee unleashed a savage war on Malaya in 1947 on a far greater scale than that which defeated the Boers nearly 50 years earlier, and that threatened by Lloyd George and Churchill in December 1921 when they offered Collins and Griffith an offer they couldn’t refuse,like Mafia Godfathers
The British drove Malayans into “protected villages”, defoliated forests using Agent Orange, drew up lists of thousands of civilians to be murdered, photographed each other holding the severed heads of natives, used techniques admired by JFK and copied by his successors in Vietnam.
Britain looted rubber and tin and other commodities from Malaya, and fraudulently described their major war as an Emergency, to keep the looters’ Insurance Premiums low.
The National Health Service and other Welfare State bonuses enjoyed in Britain were largely paid for by the looting of the non-white Empire, and stolen oil from Iraq and Iran.
In 1965 during the Wilson Government , a genocidal coup in Indonesia orchestrated by the British Ambassador there, Sir Andrew Gilchrist gifted the almost infinite riches of the country to Western Corporations.
Four years later, as Ambassador in Dublin, Gilchrist arranged for the establishment of the oath-bound, secretive Irish Times Trust, to frustrate the good work of its then Editor, Douglas Gageby, and neuter a paper that had under his leadership made common cause with the Irish nation after
a century of subservience to British interests, and firmly anchor it to its old servitude.
The British Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn was in danger of promoting democratic ideas. Though I don’t think Corbyn has much practical ability. Keir Starmer appears to be a natural successor to another Knight of the Bath, an Italian one, so dubbed by King George V in 1923. The Italian one had been on the British Foreign Office’s pay roll for years.
He was a former Socialist who had already had a Socialist MP “wacked”
before receiving his Knighthood.
His first name was Benito.
Damn it, I told you my memory sometimes lapses, I’ve forgotten his surname!.
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